


Drowned museum

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Blue Rose - Freeform, Gen, Performance Art, Shifted Identities, Surreal Road Trip, not a whiff of an OC despite appearances - that damn finale isn't easy on fic tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-16 09:30:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16951467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: The old custodian had a penchant for sharing tales. Carrie sat on the steps and listened while Douglas ventured within.





	Drowned museum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Orichalxos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orichalxos/gifts).



Old man Cecil sat alone on the stairs that led down to the museum. The last remnants of the steady rain that had kept the city pressed like a mold rippled down the steps into the dark abyss, etching new paths, pooling in the depths. Steam vents puffed up a thick vapour that filled Cecil's corner and rose along the concrete slabs of the old building's façade, where the museum's sign once shone in proud neon letters. Not enough of them were left now to make out a name, but still they pulsed through the steam with their pale blue light.

Nobody ever came from the neighboring streets; nobody lived in the city anymore, or never had. Cecil, with his old man's ears and his sad old eyes, pristine suits and ties, still kept vigil, alone on the stairs that led down to the museum. Someone had to.

 

Two strangers came in a black car. The woman wore a sleek black suit with a black tie; her name was Carrie and she walked like storms rose in her wake, but she had forgotten about it, or wasn't quite sure. The other one, she called him Douglas, wasn't whole. The part of him that existed in that city on that night shivered in his blue jeans and pink sheepskin jacket, weather too cold for just a fragment of a man.

They came to Cecil out of loneliness or pity or some other intent Cecil was not equipped to discern, passing him by on their way to nowhere, vanishing in the darkness before choosing to go back, to him, for him, for the museum, which was one and the same. (“There is smoke,” Carrie had said. “Barely,” Douglas had replied. “I do not think we are talking about the same kind of fire.” “Few things are ever truly separate, Carrie.”) So they made their way back. Pulled back by an unknown bond.

 

“You looked lonely,” Douglas said.

“No shit,” Cecil answered.

“We have a thermos of hot coffee in the car. It's a balm for the soul, on nights like this.”

“Do you offer hot beverages to every stranger you meet in decrepit calcified corners? Forget getting a license to drive around unsupervised, who let you out of your bed?”

“Maybe we would,” said Carrie, “maybe you're special. What do you make of it?” And, turning to Douglas: “You were wrong. There is fire.”

“I loathe coffee,” he said out of sheer contrarianism. But he did not loathe not kindness. Never kindness. His brow furrowed.

 

He told them of the museum, because it was what he knew, it was all he knew, and if he ever had a life outside those halls and those stairs, he had left it by the side and forgotten long ago. He told them of the triptych that was the museum's first work, its statement of purpose and guestbook at once: in the first panel, a small private plane flew low on the horizon, lured further and further by cryptic radio waves. In the second panel, mountains. In the third panel, the plane appeared again in a different sky, about to crash on a herd of white horses.

Like an old teacher who never grew tired of his class, Cecil went through his tales without faltering in his gruff, comforting voice, knowing where to linger and where to make sure the pupils still followed. He told them the temporary exhibit was about secrets and mysteries and that he'd heard a good definition of the difference between the two once (heard from a jackass, but that's the thing about jackasses, world's full of them, can't filter them out), but he would have liked to hear Carrie's and Douglas's ideas first.

“A secret is something that can't go out,” said Carrie, leaning against a darkened stone wall, letting old carvings press their patterns against her suit. “But you can be let in. If you pay the right people. Mysteries are those things that don't make sense, not even on your bedroom's ceiling at three in the morning. Like there's a door behind a door and beyond that I'm not…” She cupped her hands around her temples. “...I'm not. Or I am. You can't know until you're there and then what came before is the mystery instead. How'd I do, Prof?”

They turned to look at Douglas to hear his take, but he wasn't there.

“Oh,” said Carrie. “He does that. Nothing personal.”

Cecil nodded. Nothing personal. That sounded right.

 

Douglas descended the stairs that led down to the museum. Streams of rainwater rippled downward. Abyssal echoes filled his ears more and more with every step, spread by a row of loudspeakers that tuned out the world above leaving him alone with himself. With Douglas.

He looked up at the bottom of the well (Douglas looked up, and for a moment those were two separate actions). Carrie and Cecil were not far away, two familiar silhouettes against the night. Water reached up to his thighs. A light bulb flickered and showed him the way past an open door and further inside, into the sunken museum. He followed the pull.

In the foyer, he saw the triptych. Only half of it remained above water. The rest was covered by the sludge, which offered a blurred reflection of the upper half. In the first panel, the sky was covered in alien signs. In the second, silence. In the third panel, a plane was destined to crash against itself. Douglas moved onward.

A small room was dominated by a hyperrealistic canvas labelled  _ Unknown, Formica punched, 1980s, mixed media _ . It depicted a slab of formica, painstakingly detailed, with a single indentation shaped like a human fist. In the museum's low, unstable lights, Douglas couldn't be sure of whether the punch was real or painted. He thought about doubles, reproductions. About what would have changed if the unknown author had painted the shape of a punch on real formica, or carved it. About the echoes of an impossible impact.

At the end of a corridor, a simple drawing, black marker on paper, was protected by a decadent golden frame. In the drawing, a fantastic beast resembling an long-nosed dog with branches for antlers was threatened by the looming presence of a disembodied arm reaching out toward it from above, ready to grasp and control it. Douglas shivered in his sheepskin. There was a bottom line to all these paintings, sculptures and installations, an overstepping of the known over the unknown, relentless pursuit of the void, ashes after hubris. That drawing, simple yet crowned like a king, dictated the law of that land. Wrapped in wool, Douglas felt a closeness to the creature, impossible and hunted, and scampered away toward the safety of a lit-up room.

 

It was Carrie's turn to tell a tale, about two girls she met at a diner, a coffee pot that kept spilling and that time she felt an entire emotion and she couldn't even say for sure it was hers. “Sometimes they get lost, the emotions. Sometimes I get lost.” She had her singsong way of going round and round a story, but she laughed at Cecil's jokes and he at hers, which were crude and not nice. She saw past niceness and Cecil could meet her there. They toasted to that with the last drops of Carrie's coffee. She raised the empty thermos to get a good look inside.

“The coffee says it's time to look for him.”

“Beg your pardon, did he charm the beans too?”

“I don't think so? The coffee's kind to frequent customers, is all.”

“What is it about him that makes one think he  _ could _ have charmed the coffee if he'd only tried? That smile's too dumb to fool anyone. Is it the empty stares? He's not all here, is he.”

“Tell you a secret, Prof, I don't think I'm all here either. And neither are you.”

“That's a philosophy alright.” Cecil stood up and stretched his tired legs. He took a few steps toward the street to look at the sky and let a cold wind wash over him. “But your coffee's right. It's almost closing time. We should be looking for this dumbass of a friend of yours, and quick.”

Carrie wasn't sure it was fair to call Dougie a friend. A companion, in the sense of fellow travellers, and they'd driven through many miles together, having forgotten their beginning and toward an uncertain destination. But there was something to the completeness of him in the driver's seat and her riding shotgun, or the other way round, that words lacked the intensity for, or maybe Carrie had never studied them. There were bits and pieces of Carrie and Douglas that floated around on certain days and they didn't know whom they belonged to, only that they were theirs, of the entity that was Carrie and Douglas together at once, or any other name they may have been travelling under.

 

She followed Cecil down the steps and into the well, wading through the stagnant water. She did not care for those paintings: the tales they told with their codes and symbols were not for her. Ahead of her, the old custodian moved with the ease and apathy of a man who had spent his life among the maze and could not see its walls anymore.

 

Human voices came from inside a room at the far end of a corridor. The door was open just enough for a person to slip through; a cone of light burst through the fissure and fell like television snow on the water surface.

“Stupidity, however, is not a necessarily inherent trait,” said the voice of someone who sounded like Cecil, deep like Cecil but vibrant, angry, alive in a way that made the custodian himself look like a shadow on the corridor wall. “Therefore, please listen closely. You can have a funeral any ol' time. You dig a hole, you plant a coffin...”

They slipped through. A 35mm projector mounted on a tall tripod cast an old film on the concrete wall, whirring and skipping as old films are wont to do.  _ Unknown, There's a fight over at the morgue, 1989. Wall projector, slate, variable props, 3 to 6 performers. 3’40’’ _ . The sound bounced on the walls and water and surrounded them, filled them, expanded inside their lungs.

“...I however can not perform these test next year, next month, next week or tomorrow…” the young man continued, driven by righteous anger, lab coat shining an eerie white against the concrete. Cecil looked up, transfixed. 

“I must perform them now,” Cecil said, shadowing the film. He waded to the center of the room, rising above the water to a small, dry elevated platform until his frame came between the projector and the wall, casting his shadow over his character's and draping him in eerie brilliant white. He knelt down to pick up a pneumatic drill from the floor. In front of him, on a stone slate, Douglas lay on his back, pale and deadly still. Carrie's face was superimposed on his, young like she had never been. “I've got a lot of cutting and pasting to do, gentlemen, so please,why don't you return to your porch rockers and resume whittling...”

Two more characters entered the scene, demanding explanations. Carrie knew one of them and she knew how this 3’40’’ loop ended and she knew what to do. She was there. She had always been there.

“Thank god,” said Cecil. “This old fool is obstructing a criminal investigation. Cuff him.”

“He won't release the body for the funeral,” said a blurred ghost on the wall. “He's not human.”

 

Carrie stepped up to the platform, slipping into a pristine projected black suit instead of her drenched one (there were bits and pieces of them that floated around on certain days, she had learned to see them clearly).

“Please, Carrie. I do not suffer fools gladly, and fools with badges never.”

She was there. She had always been there.

“If I wanted teatime niceties I would've called my friend,” she said, “she's pretty and she brings muffins, which is more than I can say of y'all. Make like a bunch of ostriches who've run out of sand and fuck off, this is an official investigation.” She shushed the shadows in the corners of the frame. They faded out of the stage, leaving only a uniform bright light bathing the three of them. She walked to the cold body on the slate and took his hand. “Do it, Prof. Cut him open. Get it all out.”

 

They woke up together. She, sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the slate where she had dozed off, to the sight of cracked eggshells, feathers, unspooled cassette tapes, black ichor and small, radiant light bulbs littering the water surface. He, when the last stitch was fastened, his coroner's hands still on his chest.

What Cecil found among the autopsy's debris were three gold nuggets, each smaller than a fly, shimmering under the light bulbs’ warm glow. They bore an inscription, too small to read even with his thick glasses. She went to fetch a magnifying glass she'd seen stranded nearby.

_ Laura Palmer _ , one said. He looked at the second one:  _ Albert Rosenfield _ . Finally:  _ Dale Cooper _ . 

They took one each, for safekeeping, and if two of them got mixed up there would be time to sort it out, bits and pieces get confused all the time.

  
  
  


They sped through the highway. Their new friend rested in the back seat, pretending to nap under a makeshift blanket. Someone told a dirty joke. The others laughed. A storm rumbled behind them, threatening to drown the city whole, but by then they would be far away, sharing tales around a pot of coffee and, if they were lucky, three slices of pie.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Art sources where art sources are due: overall visuals owe a lot to Lachapelle's Museum, Gordon's marker drawing is Gordon's, the triptych winks at Karl Hunrath's story which should've totally been in TSHOTP to begin with, while both the row of speakers and the final installation are very very loosely inspired by two works on exhibit at the 2017 [event temporarily redacted for anonimity's sake].  
> I hope the shifted names aren't too much of a hassle to read. Carrie, at least, is right there in canon. For Coop I started out with "Richard" but had to find&replace midway through writing because a Richard isn't the kind of Coop featured in this fic, all his associations are negative and violent while I needed a Coop closer to the "lost among the trees" variety, still not himself but /kind/. Thankfully our boy isn't lacking tulpas so I shoved him back in Dougie's direction. Albert... Albert's a stubborn bastard. "Cecil" is mostly a Sunset Boulevard reference, by virtue of working with Gordon Cole, but it also means blind or even sixth (cursed lynchian number and also literally the sixth oldest blue rose agent)...


End file.
